That’s Twitter, deftly smashing their egg problem.
Yesterday, Twitter confused us all with some strange changes to the way replies work, but that new system is not nearly as bizarre as the way they’ve decided to tackle harassment from “egg” accounts. See, we’ve apparently been looking at this all wrong. The problem with people starting dummy Twitter accounts to harass people isn’t the harassment; the problem is that the reaction to harassment ruins Twitter’s branding.
In news straight from Twitter today that we’re not entirely convinced did not originate on The Onion, they outright acknowledged that there are “patterns of behavior” from quickly created, unpersonalized accounts but came to the conclusion that the ones being negatively affected are … people with new accounts:
We’ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others – often they don’t take the time to personalize their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalized their profile photo.
Their solution for these poor, unfortunate souls is a new default avatar, free from the stigma all the egg jokes we’ve been making for years. Is … is this an early April Fools’ joke?
(image: Twitter)
“Hey, we got rid of the eggs!”
“No, this isn’t—”
“Yes, no more eggs. You hated the eggs. You mocked the eggs. The eggs are the enemy.”
“Well yes, but—”
“And you have nothing against faceless silhouettes.”
“Well no, but—”
“So problem solved! Now no one will hate blank profiles, because they’re not eggs.”
“N—”
“PROBLEM SOLVED.”
(via Comedy Central)
Sure, Twitter has changed their default avatar before, and that wasn’t the only reason they gave for doing so this time, but it still feels like a bad joke on the people who actually deal with harassment on Twitter—especially after an election fraught with tampering by hordes of online trolls. Don’t worry, ovate friends; no matter what avatar Twitter tries to smooth things over with, you’ll always be eggs to us.
(via Jill Pantozzi, featured image via Kate Tur Haar, image via NBC)
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